This paper examines the practices and imaginaries through which the future submergence of Yusufeli, a northeastern town in Turkey, is currently experienced by its inhabitants. While the entire town center and nineteen villages will be inundated under a dam reservoir, life in Yusufeli is not merely reduced to a sense of decay and destruction. Rather, my ethnography of Yusufeli as an ongoing socio-material construction site reveals the ways in which the dam-building process produces a politics of negotiation, a trope of (self-)sacrifice and docility, and a notion of salvaged and resettled nature. Yusufeli is known as a stronghold—and, in fact, the birthplace—of the Justice and Development Party that has been ruling the country for the last 18 years. Its inhabitants, therefore, engage in a politics of negotiation and compensation with the government by framing the dam-induced environmental and spatial losses as their self-sacrifice for the greater national good. I, therefore, argue that we need to go beyond the binary of “resistance against” vs. “submission to and/or aspiration for" infrastructures, on which social studies of infrastructure and development have mostly focused in their analysis of political responses to such projects. Moreover, by tracing local state officials’ and engineers’ attempts to compensate for the sacrifice zones, this paper critically analyzes the practice of what I call salvage agriculture – a form of technical intervention to save “endangered” socio-natures, such as agricultural soil and fruit trees, in advance of the submergence. These practices, so I contend, transform historical socio-natural landscapes into a modular, ahistorical, and moveable “nature” and serve to shift public attention from dam-induced socio-natural destruction to a process of reconstruction.